Small is Beautiful

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Summary
Mike Williams discusses large vs. small software development teams, concluding that smaller teams are better suited for most cases.

Bio

Mike Williams moved to Sweden in 1970 and joined Ericsson as a hardware designer. He and Bjarne Däcker founded the Ericsson Computer Science Laboratory 1980 where Erlang was invented. Mike's role was to develop the first Erlang virtual machine (Joe developed the compiler and machine architecture). In 1990 Mike glided into management by a complete accident, and found he rather liked it.

This year’s Erlang Factory SF Bay Area 2012 had an A-list sell-out line-up of speakers which included Erlang Inventors Mike Williams and Robert Virding discussing software approaches used in the industry and the unique features of the Erlang VM and a Keynote talk from Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of The Linux Foundation.

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"Working in groups drastically reduces our intelligence and ability to think logically"This adds up to the fact that, even if people were still as smart while in groups,having to work in groups, and synchronize with other people, would still be a bottleneckin software projects, due to the cost of information sharing (it takes time to explainthings to people, and they rarely get it right, or have to figure out the details bythemselves).(More on this here: www.mentofacturing.com/mentofacturing.pdf)

This is by the way what explains Brooks statement:"Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later."

And the fact that managers often overlook the amount of details that need to be take care ofto translate things from the approximations of natural languages to the exactness ofprogramming languages, could be explained by this Bertrand Russell's statement:"Everything is vague to a degree you don't realize until you have tried to make it precise."